Hmm. Well, I’ve fannied around for ages with writing this post and haven’t really written anything. I started writing something but it’s on my laptop and I can’t remember writing anything in it that I cared about at all. That’s probably not a good sign.

I want to write a short post, then, saying where i think I’m at. No doubt somewhat hilariously, I had a dream that changed my mind about my direction a little bit. In the dream Jonathan Kearney was telling me my prototype was boring as it was too much like a school text book or something. It was prescriptive. I woke up and immediately thought ‘I must look at Anselm Kiefer, Ansel Adams and Christian Boltanski again’. So there we go. This undoubtedly makes me sound like a muppet but it seems I achieve that pretty regularly anyway. The important thing is that those three artists mark a continuation of earlier thoughts and making something with a simple and direct, quite emotional presence. The thought didn’t just come from a dream, though it seems to have been part of the way my brain processed it. This is really a thought for the work in a gallery space. I may need a different approach for the online version.

I think this means making the visual end of the finished thing very simple. There won’t be complicated things hanging off each question. Each question will be accompanied by a photograph, projected large, maybe on to an interesting or shaped surface. This brings me back to another early aim of this project: immersive installations. Thinking of that, I quite like Alison Goldfrapp’s website. I like the fact that her background image/video is always the size of the window. I don’t think I’ve seen that anywhere else. It seems to have been done in Flash. It gives the whole thing a really absorbing quality, with the way it’s moving as well. The sound adds to this. I don’t think I’m going to be using sound though.

This means that by far the most complicated thing I have to deal with over the next six months is figuring out how to deal with the agency of the questionnaire and also how to programme it, which will be fun. So much fun.